Those that made it through Mondays post will know I did play some games at the expo. Three of those games were new to me. So I thought I’d share my brief thoughts on those games considering I didn’t do that in the other post.

Ominoes

This game was bought by Jonathan’s daughter after trying it out on one of the stands at the expo.

Ominoes is a light abstract game, with a fair bit of luck involved.

Despite that luck element to the game, it is still a nice enjoyable game. There is a little take that, blocking your opponents plans by moving their dice away from a scoring opportunity, or even stealing a scoring opportunity for yourself. The later is possible if there are enough wild sides showing.
A good intro abstract game, and great buy by Jonathan’s daughter.

The Lost Expedition

Next year a Judge Dredd game based on this is coming out. Osprey when asked assured me that the Dredd game is not just a reskinning of this game, but will have extra stuff (although to be fair I didn’t press them on this bit, and just accepted their word for it), and would be out February 2019.

The Dredd version is why I’d been holding off buying The Lost Expedition. But hearing it was still a ways off from coming out, I decided to take the plunge and finally buy this game. The added bonus for me buying the game from the publisher at the expo was that I got not one but both of the promos for the game. I managed both because I had bought up while buying it the card quality issue for London. Something that they had rectified and were offering replacement cards to those affected. I said I’d already sleeved mine, so had no need of the replacements. So the Osprey member of staff gave me both promos instead.

But that’s the boring stuff of how I got the game and the promos. What did I think of the game after playing it?

We played this as a 3 player co-op, which is one of the cool things about this game. It can be played as a solo game, co-op or finally as a competitive team v team game.
I thought as a co-op the game worked really well. The co-op part really only came into play once the cards for the day phase had been played. Then you are discussing which option on the cards to take as a group. I suppose this phase could be open to alpha gamer abuse, but that kind of gets balanced out by the leader having the final say on decisions.
I like that you have to make some hard decisions with the cards you are dealt with at the start of each round. Do you play the cards during the day stage or night stage? This is particularly hard to decide when you have all bad cards. The fact that during the day phase the cards played before executing them, ordered in ascending numeric order. Then in the night phase the cards are executed in the order they are played. Is a nice touch and adds to the decision process of when to play the cards.
I like the resource management side of the game.
Once again like The Mind, this is a game that if you decided to sleeve it will not fit the box. Heck even unsleeved you can’t add the promos and have it fit nicely.
Yeah I enjoyed this a lot, and want to try the other 2 modes of play now. Plus I can’t wait to see how this is with Judge Dredd.

Ganz schon clever

This game started getting some buzz after it was nominated for this years Kennerspiel des Jahres.
The English version of this game comes out later in the year, so for now unless you can read German, you have to download the rules translation from bgg.
I’ve played this as a 2 player and 3 player game.
During our first play we were learning the rules, and I was a little unsure about the game. Then I started comboing off. At that point there was a total swing in how I was feeling about the game. Suddenly I was thinking “Wow!” that was cool.
There are some nice tactical decisions to make in this roll and write. Mainly to do with which dice you want and which ones you will be making available to the other players.

I love the fact you can as you complete lines, or advance past certain points on a single line get bonuses such as a reroll or +1 to a die. Or even combo off by being able to put a cross somewhere else on the sheet.
This just might have become my favourite roll and write.